[Mount Athos]

This whole "elitist" thing is one big straw man.
I feel it fundamentally misrepresents the major issue at hand.

People just want a candidate with a well documented strict constructionist history. There are dozens of such candidates. This was not one of them. When campaigning, Bush promised to nominate such a justice, so many of his supporters rightly feel disappointed, even wronged, by him not doing so.

[RFEngineer]

"People just want a candidate with a well documented strict constructionist history"

I haven't made up my mind, but I wonder, would this even be a question if she went to lawschool at Harvard, for instance?

[RobbyS]

a well documented strict constructionist history. Few top lawyers in the country leave such a trail. My sister was once a legal secretary for a major Houston firm who could pull a long, long brief out of his head and dictate it in one sitting.( Sort of like Roberts did when he was performing for the Senate.) But he never wrote stuff for scholarly publication. He only worked for money.